North Eastern Corner

The north eastern corner of the Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory at Chatham, photographed in 2016, shows what decades of closure look like on a working industrial building. Paint peels from the walls in long strips, each layer a different era of maintenance and neglect. Rust bleeds from metal fittings left in place. A high window, partly broken, sends a column of light down into the space, catching the texture of surfaces that have not been touched in years. The factory was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant. Construction began in 1938 on land purchased from Christen Christensen in Chatham, with the building contract let to D. Gallagher. Gallagher died before the factory was completed; his estate finished the job. The official opening took place on 4 November 1939, drawing a crowd of approximately 5,000. The plant cost around £60,000 to build and was designed from the outset to process condensed milk, butter, and other dairy products, with capacity for 1,000 gallons of milk per hour and machinery supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney. The factory expanded substantially through the 1940s and 1950s under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding amenity buildings, a canteen, a recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. Four Babcock and Wilcox boilers powered the plant. A riverside pump house on the Manning River supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Peters Creameries was the primary employer in the Manning Valley region for close to four decades. The plant ran until the late 1990s, when successive corporate owners consolidated production into more modern facilities elsewhere. The building at Chatham has remained standing since, vandalised and largely empty. This photograph records the north eastern corner as it stood in 2016, the year Brett Patman documented the interior for Lost Collective.